


keep it steady

by kiden



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 00:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15545487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiden/pseuds/kiden
Summary: "There are no stars to see anyway so Pete looks at Patrick instead, the familiar shape of his face and the way Chicago casts light across it, yellow and blue and white. The time apart reversed the years on his face, and Patrick looks so impossibly young sometimes, his not- quite-red hair falling softly across his brow, that Pete can’t help but remember."(repost)





	keep it steady

The sun goes down with a promise to come up again and there’s only a few bright stars to be seen through the light pollution of the city. It’s just another hotel rooftop, and Pete has stood on so many of them wrapped in hoodies with the wind biting cold at his face or drenched in sweat on summer nights indistinguishable from the rest. Sometimes it was about the fall, about the sickening splat, about really flying for just a handful of seconds instead of between handfuls of pills. Now he feels tethered to something heavier than his sadness; things that feel lighter, toothless smiles and how his fingers always smell like baby formula. The person he is now never thinks about flying. Not like that.

Patrick doesn’t say anything. He just plops down beside him on the concrete with a small grunt and draws his knees up to wrap his bare arms around them. There are no stars to see anyway so Pete looks at Patrick instead, the familiar shape of his face and the way Chicago casts light across it, yellow and blue and white. The time apart reversed the years on his face, and Patrick looks so impossibly young sometimes, his not-quite-red hair falling softly across his brow, that Pete can’t help but remember. The days when Patrick was new and felt reckless, when Pete pressed against him in smokey clubs and in the dark of the van, wearing him like a suicide vest. That Patrick could break him, something powerful and dangerous to be careful with. Patrick was always just that. Too volatile to hold on to.

But Pete did it anyway, sunk his hopes into him, and his teeth, held on so tightly until, like everything else, he’d lost him. Patrick disappearing in a whisper instead and Pete the controlled explosion, the only wreckage to be seen left behind in a hotel room in New York.

It had hurt more than almost anything Pete could’ve imagined, even with all the things knocking violently against the inside of his head, watching Patrick without him. A pain so big that the only thing capable of chasing it away was how fucking proud he was, but it was so short-lived, so fleeting, so selfish to go and wish that Patrick was less talented without him. To pretend that Patrick was broken too, that Pete wasn’t the only one falling apart.

To pretend that there was nothing of him on Patrick’s album, little pieces of Pete in his lyrics just like there were pieces of Patrick all over his own. Or worse, that he was there, completely, a young man is a pulled pin looking for a grenade. In all the ways Pete chose to fool himself it was that one which cut the deepest wound, as he watched the pounds shed off Patrick, the years, until he looked as young as Pete felt, just as vulnerable.

Patrick keeps his eyes on the skyline, the one that’s always been in both their veins, but he bumps his shoulder against Pete’s and bites his bottom lip to gnaw back a smile. And Pete wants to tell him about the morning he woke up alone on a bus full of strangers, when he looked in the mirror and saw his own skeleton, how he thought of Patrick’s bones, too, wearing a well-tailored suit a thousand miles away. How he’d later seen pictures of himself on the internet, gaunt and ashen, half himself on stage wearing Patrick’s name across his chest. It had felt like a Batsignal, a teenage cry for help, a prayer for something that wasn’t coming back.

“Stop it,” Patrick breaks the silence. “Get out of that place. You don’t live there anymore.” “I’m here,” Pete says, and means it. “I’m here, Rick.”

There’d been a moment, a day or a week or an entire month, where Pete was terrified they wouldn't fit anymore. That the language was gone, the sutures that Pete had sown between them, sloppy with desperation, binding them together, that it was all gone. Until Patrick’s voice hit the right note, slammed against Pete’s chest the way it always used to, and they were there, bright as the midday sun, and Patrick laughed. Patrick laughed until the sound of it chased away the wetness in Pete’s eyes and launched himself across the room to him. Pete had whispered, oh God, oh, fucking thank Christ, breathing for the first time in years, Patrick’s face pressed against his neck and holding on so tight his arms ached.

Patrick’s hands sank into his unkept hair and Pete knocked the hat off his head to move in carefully, to press his mouth to where Patrick’s lips cut a smile into his cheek. He’d wanted to tell him never again, that he couldn’t go through it, would never make it, but Patrick beat him to the punch. Held Pete’s face close to his own and whispered in his deepest, most broken voice that it was this or nothing, to tell him they’d make it work.

Pete promised like being on one knee, like slipping on a ring, and held on to Patrick a little longer until it was time to call Joe and Andy. And then he’d promised them too, they both had: Never again.

“I heard once -.”

“From who?” Patrick asks, interrupting with a quick smile.

“Knock it off,” Pete huffs, elbowing him. “I heard once that like, everyone you meet in life you’ve met in a hundred lives. That you, you know, you keep meeting the same souls over and over again but they, like, they’re always someone else to you. Sometimes your mom or your brother or your friend. Sometimes your lover.”

“That's a nice thought,” Patrick says, casting his eyes back to the city.

“That’s why you can meet some people and just know them. That’s why you can feel them in your bones.”

“So last time,” Patrick says, and Pete’s eyes are drawn to the ring on his finger. The one that Patrick touches constantly, curling his fingers against it, rubbing it along the seam of his jeans. That reminder.

“Or next time,” Pete agrees. “Maybe both. Maybe we just needed a hiatus.” Patrick’s laughter is warm, falls around Pete and makes him a real boy again. Like always. “You’re an idiot,” Patrick sighs, and it sounds a lot like an I love you.

Instead of answering, Pete pulls Patrick against him and then to the ground, curling around him like a thousand times before. Hotel rooms and too tiny bunks and between duffle bags and amps, a hundred silent wishes and promises and songs in the dark. Eventually, he says, “I used to think you’d either kill me or save me.”

“And?” Patrick says, a vest strapped tight to Pete’s chest.

“Turned out they were kind of the same thing. It’s just you.”

“Yeah,” Patrick nods, his forehead pressed to Pete’s chin. “I know what you mean.”

And Pete’s sure it’s the truth. How many times has he killed Patrick, how many times have they brought each other back to life, back home, back to where it’s safe.

It’s always been just the two of them.


End file.
